I agree, while wearables (smartwatches etc) might get some traction in the mainstream consumer market, the real market for IoT or machine to machine will be for organizations who are looking to provide newer services and solutions to modernize current ones. Personaly I can see a lot of growth in traditional areas like logistics, transportation, public services and retail.

14 years and a couple of jobs ago, I was designing a high end singleboard computer for a large scale embedded system. The boss wanted a big-endian RISC CPU but I broght Intel in for due diligence. They flat-out refused to show me a selector guide, and instead demanded to know exactly what we were building so they could prescribe a CPU and chip set. Which would then be the only one we could get design info for. The attitude was unbelieveable. I was really rooting for the mobile pentium of the time, but Intel was too arrogant to work with. We settled for IBM's PowerPC of the time, despite its non-existent support ecosystem and clueless field tech support. Intel needed to learn back then it didn't have a monopoly any more, and start listening to its customers. I hope they figure it out before they have to start laying off...

I'm thinking production environments Tom -- factories, warehouses, processing plants, refineries. The ROI comes from avoiding downtime, stockouts, bottlenecks, inventory failures. And that's where you might want just enough processing power at the point of collection to say "send data back only when its below ABC or above XYZ."

They're opening some of their factories to other companies too. And they axed the TV program and are going to do a small amount of staff reducing. Krzanich seems intent on making things leaner and more focused, even as he talks up a gameplan that's enormously ambitious.

Intel's ability to ramp up supply quickly for mobile products used to be a key advantage compared to rivals such as AMD. Today, Intel has more capacity than it needs. Intel just delayed opening a fab in Chandler, AZ in response to weaker demand.

Intel is a big supporter of Facebook's Open Compute Project. Don't be surprised if Intel chips start finding their way into several lines of commodity, white box switches that companies will use to build out software-defined networks. It is a small market now, potentially a big one.

It seems like many early Internet of things initiatives lean toward shipping all the data back for analysis. But some will take processing at the point of data collection, either for speed or to lessen the data transfer load. Think Intel can cash in on that IoT opportunity?

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.